by James Philip
William Whitelaw understood exactly what Sir Richard Hull was telling him. If anybody had ever been in any doubt, the time for half-measures had long gone.
Chapter 28
Saturday 20th June 1964
HMS Tiger, Tarout Bay, Persian Gulf
Even with all the scuttles wide open and several fans blowing it was uncomfortably sultry in Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey’s day cabin. Even the two Saudi ministers seemed a little hot and bothered, although not so much on account of the afternoon heat but because they felt like supplicants.
Lieutenant General Michael Carver was carrying the dust of Abadan Island on his shoes and figuratively, on his shoulders as he and Major General Thomas Daly joined the Flag Officer, ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron, and his guests in the relatively spacious cabin in the stern of the cruiser. Carver affected nodding bows to the two Saudis before hands were cursorily shaken.
“Forgive my keeping you waiting,” he smiled, tight-lipped. ‘My flight was delayed by a little local difficulty.”
The Red Army was flooding past Basra into the Faw Peninsula and was in the process of investing the western bank of the Shatt al-Arab. Carver’s aircraft had had to take a detour east over Iranian territory in order to remain outside the likely engagement envelopes of the surface-to-air missile systems the Soviets would undoubtedly be striving, as he spoke, to emplace opposite Abadan.
“Is it true that the Soviets are already on the outskirts of Umm Qasr?” Asked thirty-six year old Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi Minister of Defence and Aviation.
“We believe so, sir,” Carver confirmed, his tone significantly more sanguine than his premonitions. There was disturbing evidence that the complete breakdown of Iraqi resistance and drastic – positively Draconian - steps to reorganise the Red Army’s logistical train, had supercharged the recent acceleration of the Soviet advance. South of Basra the enemy’s spearheads would be parked on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf possibly within hours; in the east the pathfinder elements of the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army were exploring his picket lines north of Khorramshahr along the Iraqi-Iranian border. The Soviets had discovered a second wind after being briefly bogged down in central Iraq; now the Red Army was sweeping all before supported by a Red Air Force which had achieved virtual aerial supremacy over much of the conquered lands. “Presently, the enemy is probing our lines north of Abadan.”
Michael Carver had no intention of discussing the situation east of the Shatt al-Arab with his Saudi ‘allies’ in any kind of detail. Regardless of whether they had come onboard HMS Tiger to ask for help, or to pledge their own support to the cause; the secrets of Operation Lightfoot were going to remain just that, secret.
He nodded to the tall, balding Australian commander of the small ‘Anzac Brigade’ currently guarding the northern Kuwaiti border.
Daly was stern-faced. He and Michael Carver had met several times in England when he was posted to the Staff College at Camberley after the Second World War and their recent conversations had been nothing if not ‘frank’ concerning the prospects for the coming ground campaign.
“My boys have established strong defensive positions south of the Iraq-Kuwait border,” he explained. “Command is now unified under a combined Australian-British staff and Kuwaiti officials are doing what they can to mobilise local defence militias to release my troops from lines of communications duties. It is my assessment that the Soviet forces across the border are in urgent need of rest and replenishment and possess only limited offensive capabilities at this time. That said, it is apparent that enemy forces already in the Faw Peninsula and the desert north of the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti borders are already numerically superior to those available to the Anzac Brigade we are attempting to build up at the present time.”
The two Saudi ministers listened in quietly respectful silence.
Thirty-three year old Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, probably the most ‘westernised’ member of the Saudi government was in every respect the coolest man in the room. While Prince Abdulaziz fomented and glowered like a man about to explode, Yamani simply stroked his goatee beard and pondered the possibilities.
Yamani was of that generation of privileged young Saudis whom necessity had decreed should be educated abroad to learn what they might about the ways of the World. The son of a Qadi – a respected judge and scholar of Islamic law – who was currently the Grand Mufti of Indonesia and Malaysia, Yamani was among the first of his contemporaries to rise to prominence in the Kingdom. Having earned a law degree at King Fouad I University in Cairo, the government had sent him to the Comparative Law Institute at New York University, where in 1955 he had earned a master’s degree in Comparative Jurisprudence. He had married Laila, an Iraqi woman in Brooklyn, thereafter moving on to Harvard Law School to collect a second master’s degree. Returning to the Kingdom he had become an advisor to the government during the ‘troubled’ period when Kind Saud and Prince Faisal were vying for power; adroitly avoiding burning his boats with either of the competing factions. His reward had been his appointment as Minister for Petroleum and Mineral Resources, the Kingdom’s key economic post.
Nick Davey, for once in his life in a grimly sober mood had suggested his guests take chairs and called for ‘refreshments’; coffee rather than the normal pink gins with which he customarily entertained ‘visitors’.
Yamani glanced at his Saudi companion, momentarily arching an eyebrow.
It was the only prompt the Minister of Defence required.
“The Crown Prince had decreed that all the former American war stores depots within the boundaries of the Kingdom will be opened with immediate effect, for the use of the Kingdom’s national armed forces and use of the Australian, British and New Zealand Commonwealth Expeditionary Force.”
“That is most gratifying, Your Highness,” Michael Carver remarked mechanically. Better late than never. Although, not that much better. To the best of his knowledge there was no available inventory of what was actually stored in the ‘war stores depots’ and in any event, most of the ammunition was the wrong calibre for his guns, and practically all the heavy equipment was mothballed and partially disabled. He waited, knowing that Abdulaziz knew this already.
“Movement orders have been issued to the 1st and 4th Royal Saudi Divisions. The 1st will entrain at Riyadh for transfer to Damman as soon as possible. The 4th, which as you know is based at Jeddah, will embark at that port for transit by sea to Damman. The Crown Prince has instructed me to personally liaise with you, General Carver, as to the future disposition and employment of these formations.”
The Englishman allowed himself a half-smile.
The Saudi 1st Division based north of the capital was equipped with US M-60 and M-48 tanks. It was ‘active’ whereas the 4th Division in the south was a ‘reserve’ formation equipped with a mishmash of up-gunned World War II era Shermans and American Army cast off M-48s. More pertinently, the 1st Division could be transferred relatively swiftly, say in a couple of weeks, from Riyadh to Damman and thence to at worst, a blocking position south of the Kuwaiti border, or at best, onto ground west of Kuwait where it might threaten the right flank of 3rd Caucasian Tank Army as it continued to pour into Basra Province.
Michael Carver was determined to strike while the iron glowed red in his hand.
“Nick,” he inquired, turning to his host. “Would you have a map of the ground west of the Kuwaiti border to hand by any chance?”
Within a minute the five men were standing over a relief map of the western Persian Gulf.
“Let me be plain with you,” he warned the two Saudis. “I do not have in mind some kind of grand blocking or defensive battle with the Red Army. That said, I do intend to engage it and to destroy a substantial part of it in southern Iraq. However, before I can do that I need two things from the Kingdom.”
He made eye contact with both Prince Abdulaziz and Yamani.
“The RAF will need every free fall general purpose bomb it c
an get its hands on from the Riyadh war stores depot. Aircraft can land next to it, load up and fly missions directly against targets in Iraq assuming the necessary logistical and maintenance arrangements can be put in place in the next few days and the principle available runway is lengthened by some five hundred yards. Jeddah is too far away for this purpose.”
He looked up again, seeking nods of agreement before dropping his eyes to the map spread across the table between the four men. He jabbed a forefinger at the desert fifty miles west of the Kuwaiti border.
“If by hook or by crook we can assemble fifty, ideally a hundred Centurions, M-60s and M-48s here,” he said, “with sufficient mechanized infantry in support, and fuel enough for two to three days hard fighting,” now he smiled a saturnine, predatory smile, “Tom,” he half-smiled to the Australian, “might just give the Soviets a run for their money!”
Chapter 29
Saturday 20th June 1964
Kennedy Family Compound, Hyannis Port, Massachusetts
Before the October War Ted Sorensen was one of the few irreplaceable gears in the engine room of the White House machine. Jack Kennedy had once referred to Sorensen as his ‘intellectual blood bank’. It was Sorenson who had crafted Kennedy’s inauguration speech, the man behind the immortal phrase ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’, which had so caught the imagination of not just America but of the whole Western World. Back in those days the words had come easily; these days nothing came easily, and nothing would ever be simple again.
“We’re not just talking about walking away from the Fulbright Plan, are we?” He asked, looking up from the notepad on his knee. He and Bobby Kennedy were sitting on the porch of the old Kennedy family house enjoying the sunshine in the cool breeze blowing off Nantucket Sound. “That’s why we’re keeping Ben Bradlee and the other news guys away from the President, isn’t it?”
His questions were entirely rhetorical.
However, he had needed to ask them; if only to salve his conscience.
“You could say that,” his friend agreed.
The President had called the Chiefs of Staff to Camp David that weekend. It was one thing for Curtis LeMay to say he had the other Chiefs ‘onside’, another entirely for the Commander-in-Chief to look his most senior military advisors in the eye and ask them the question.
Nobody actually thought ‘the situation’ in the Persian Gulf would end up with the United States being dragged into a shooting war; but LeMay was right to demand that if his people were being asked to go into harm’s way they needed to be armed with a lot more than just ‘stern words and good intentions’.
After the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Carrier Division Seven was the most formidable naval battle group on the planet. Its ships were crammed full of every technological marvel the American taxpayer could afford, and its flagship, the USS Kitty Hawk boasted an air group comprised of more than eighty of the most advanced aircraft ever to take to the skies.
Sorenson took off his glasses and distractedly cleaned them.
“Back before the war,” he observed, “we’d have made soundings about this stuff. We’d have tried to figure out who we could talk to. We’d have gone out of our way to talk to people like Ben Bradlee. We’re flying blind, Bobby.”
The Head of the Philadelphia Bureau of Newsweek, Ben Bradlee had been a friend for many years but ever since the Battle of Washington Ben had not been buying anything the Administration had to sell.
The Attorney General got to his feet, paced briefly, turned to his companion.
“Here’s the thing, Ted,” he prefaced. Jack had asked him to take a couple of days ‘out’ with Sorenson to work through how to deal with the media if and when something really bad happened in the Middle East. “CIA says the Red Army has bet everything on the Iran-Iraq thing. Every card on the table, last throw of the dice, the whole shebang. The Chiefs don’t buy it. LeMay’s got this crazy idea in his head that the whole thing in the Gulf is just some kind of large scale ‘diversion’. He’s afraid they’re going to hit us someplace else; Japan, maybe, or Norway, or Sweden. He may have a point, the Russians screwed us over so badly we never saw any of this coming.”
“Does it actually matter if the Soviets have another army someplace else?”
“I don’t know. But it matters if their fleet of new nuclear submarines in the Pacific survived the bombing in October sixty-two!”
Sorenson thought this was beginning to sound a little paranoid.
“We’ve got twenty or thirty nuclear subs, Bobby?” He asked the question, moved on immediately. “Besides, look at the problems we’ve got in Illinois, Wisconsin and the Pacific North West. Things must be ten times worse in Russia?”
His friend chewed this over for some seconds.
“Jack will do anything to avoid another nuclear exchange with the Russians,” he said eventually. “Anything, Ted. He’d open the grain stores and hand the Brits a blank cheque if they’d draw in their horns. There’s this thing in the Gulf. The problem down in the South Atlantic. The Mediterranean is a problem, too. The situation in Egypt is really bad news. The Brits are out of control. Heck, that Thatcher woman threatened to nuke Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk!”
Sorenson’s brow furrowed.
“That was only if they used nukes against us again, Bobby. In retrospect wasn’t that what the Soviets got away with back in February hiding behind their Red Dawn proxies?”
“That’s another thing. The deal we’re looking for with the Soviets undercuts Red Dawn over here.”
“But not in Europe or anywhere else?”
Bobby Kennedy pretended he had not heard this.
“If Premier Thatcher was more reasonable,” he explained. “Or if somebody else was in charge over there in Oxford, maybe things would be different. But we’ve got to the point where we can’t deal with that woman!”
Ted Sorenson sighed.
“Margaret Thatcher isn’t Fidel Castro, Bobby.”
His friend flinched as his he had been struck.
“Heck,” Sorenson went on, “if we can talk to the Soviets we ought to be able to talk to our friends!”
Bobby Kennedy’s jaw worked but no words formed on his lips.
The other man took off his glassed, squinted thoughtfully at his friend.
“Don’t you think?” He asked, gloomily.
Chapter 30
Saturday 20th June 1964
Merton College, Oxford
Frank Waters had been putting off this moment for several days; ever since he had learned his fate and had the balance of what he like to call his mind, somewhat perturbed at the Neave’s dinner table just over a week ago. In a life of thrills, spills, and misadventures marked by numerous deeds of gallantry and no little calumny, the last few weeks had been well, downright...strange. Not to mention extraordinarily invigorating.
He had confidently expected to be taken out and shot right up to the night his KGB guards marched him onto the Tu-114 transport and he found himself manacled in a seat twenty feet away from Kosygin, Shelepin and that wishy-washy scientist chappie Sakharov. In retrospect the most peculiar thing about that nine-hour flight had been his interviews with first Shelepin, the KGB top dog, and later, with Sakharov. Shelepin whom Frank Waters strongly suspected liked hurting and killing people – he had seen a lot of men of his type over the years – had coldly quizzed him about Brize Norton, and various politicians whom he had never met or honestly and truly, would not recognise if they were standing in front of him. And then Sakharov had sat down next to him and with the dowdy, stern-faced interpreter ‘Natasha’ impatiently translating with the ill-grace of one who would much rather have been somewhere else, they had had a fascinating little chat.
Sakharov had eyed Frank Waters’s restraints apologetically.
‘Comrade Natasha Nikolayevna must remain so that Comrade Shelepin and our intelligence services may be apprised of our conversation, Colonel,’ he had explained. ‘If you are
agreeable we will converse in Russian.’
This had set his mind off on a tangent.
Natasha? Why had the woman adopted the westernized form of her first name? Nikolayevna, daughter of Nikolayev suggested her given name was Natalya. Had she been a spy somewhere? Or worked in an embassy in the West before the war?
‘Kak vy khotite, tovarishch,’ he had agreed.
As you wish, comrade.
Sakharov had tried to sell him the line that carrying on the war was ‘stupid’. After the ‘madness’ of the Cuban Missiles War it was the interests of every man, woman and child on the planet that there should be a peace conference. He believed, apparently in all sincerity, that nuclear weapons should be renounced forever. The old soldier had thought that all sounded rather like pie in the sky. He would have discounted the Soviet scientist as a crank but for the sadness in his eyes and the uncomplicated genuineness which positively leeched from every pore in his body.
Natalya Nikolayevna had not batted an eyelid when the scientist explained that he was the man ‘responsible for building the hydrogen bombs which had destroyed London and other British cities’. Or when he had expressed the hope that one day ‘men of science of all nations will unite in the cause of peace’.
Returning to England the Army had fed the returning hero a succession of hearty square meals before he realised that everybody else seemed to be on half-rations. Although the medicos wanted to build him up after his experiences in the East he had felt horribly guilty about getting special treatment. It went against the grain; one for all and all for one, there was a bloody war on and everybody was supposed to be in it together. Notwithstanding, he had carried on ‘tucking in’ and within a few days he had felt stronger, fitter and begun, slowly to put a little flesh back on his bones. It was only now that he realised he had been in a bad way a fortnight ago, literally a bag of bones, a bit of a scarecrow in fact.